So it looks like Noxychu spent a little time this holiday season cooking up a special treat!

That's her and her new beau, Glar, cooking up a delicious batch of Wowhead cookies! They came out beautifully, and I'm crossing my fingers that I'll get some in the mail before Christmas day—and word is that she might be sending some to Blizzard as well. ;)

it was a great time last night, lots of people there. One person said there were over 9000—but I realized later that may have been a joke. I even saw a lot of people who I had seen two years ago at the Wrath release event—I even ran into John Finch, the guy who was first in line last year. He said he'd arrived 48 hours before, and was still only 20th in line.

Once again, I want to thank Blizzard for NOT being the kind of company who tries to create buzz by not having enough copies of the game at launch. I wasn't there until about 7pm, and I still got a Collector's Edition. :)

This whole process has been kind of nostalgic for me, because for those of you who've been with us for a while, you may know that our discussion and picture gallery of the original Wrath launch event two years ago was actually our very firstset of blog posts. So with that in mind, I leave you now as I left you then, with the most important part of the whole process:

We recently previewed the upcoming Cataclysm zones, where we showed off the awesome new zones players will be able to experience in less than a week. We've not only got awesome zones such as Uldum, Kezan and Vashj'ir to look forward to, but many of these new zones feature new dungeons and raids as well! Cataclysm will ship with eight new dungeons, two upgraded Heroic versions of classic dungeons, and four new raids (with more being released in later patches). These dungeons will (of course) feature both normal and heroic versions, with raid encounters offering unlockable encounter-specific difficulty toggling. These raids will support the Flexible Lock System (detailed here, as well as in our Cataclysm Guide), allowing players to adjust raid sizing as necessary.

We've already seen quite a bit of new dungeon loot courtesy of the Cataclysm Beta, and there are many new items which can be purchased from vendors (including Tier 11 pieces!) using the new Justice Points and Valor Points curren

We're finally in the last days until World of Warcraft's Cataclysm expansion hits, bringing with it two new races (which we covered previously) and a ton of new zones, quests, dungeons, raids and more! We've gotten quite a look at the future of World of Warcraft with the recent patch, The Shattering, in which Deathwing brought destruction to the zones of Azeroth, changing our World of Warcraft forever.

The Shattering patch brought massive changes to all of the existing zones. For those purchasing the Cataclysm expansion, you will see new zones being added to the game. These new zones include 4 new zones for Goblin and Worgen races and 6 new leveling / endgame zones for players level 80 - 85. Check out our preview of these zones, from our Cataclysm Guide, including maps, screenshots and even videos after the break!

So the team is straggling back in from BlizzCon, and slowly but surely catching up on our sleep and resuming our normal duties!

For those of you who are looking for our minute-by-minute coverage, you can find it on our Live Blog page. If, however, you're looking for a recap and summary of the festivities—and of course all the pictures we took—then this is the place!

Check after the break for thoughts, news (summarized in a more readable format), and pics!

I know that I have to give up my WoW-Players card if I even so much as express interest in another MMO, but the guys over at ZAM just showed me some of the fan art they have coming in for this City of Heroes Contest—where you have to draw a picture of your character—and some of it is crazy good. I thought you guys might want to see!

In the recent Cataclysm beta build the new Guild UI has been partially enabled. The new Guild UI is only available by typing /groster currently, but presumably will have it's own menu option in the future.

Inside you'll start off with the revamped roster list. Several new panels have been added to the roster, with the default panel displaying level, class, name and last zone the player was in. A little drop down at the top will let you switch to the other two panels: Guild Status and Professions. The Guild Status panel is pretty much exactly the same as the one we currently see in-game. The real nice part about the new roster is the addition of the all-new Professions panel! The list allows you to see who has what profession, and then open up a second window to see all the patterns you have within the guild, and to view who has them.

Check out an extensive visual tour of the new Guild UI after the break! Also, be sure to check out our recent Guild Perks blog for a full rundown of all the interesting new benefits you can earn by being in a guild!

Along with the rest of the fansites, I was afforded the opportunity to take a tour of the Blizzard offices. Obviously I wasn't allowed to take any pictures of sensitive documents (despite my best efforts), but I did get a few fun shots of what sets the Blizzard offices apart from most other companies.

There are a lot of shots I didn't include here—most of them pictures of hallways or offices, things that every company would have—but I did try and take special care to get pictures of the things that make the Blizzard offices special. I included explanatory captions wherever possible.

I apologize, as usual, for my lack of a decent camera. All these pictures were taken on a very old iPhone. =/

So I'm in my hotel room, packing my stuff up and heading down to the convention floor. I'm going to use this blog post to write down my random thoughts as we go on through the day, just in case some of you may be bored enough that they want to hear MY running commentary on their DirecTV broadcast. :P

Don't forget that for more immediate news and pictures—the kind I don't have to run up to the press room to publish—you can follow us on Twitter:

So now that I've gotten to sit back down at my computer and actually do some typing, I'm going to elaborate a little on some of the thoughts I mentioned in the previous blog, and on Twitter. I wasn't made for Twitter—I talk too much. :(

I'm also posting the (admittedly meager) gallery of photos I managed to take, though the majority of the time we were restricted from using cameras.

Now THIS is interesting. I assume all of you who are both Blizzard fans and iPhone owners have already heard the news, but for those of you who haven't: Today, Blizzard released the WoW Armory app for the iPhone. I'm a Mac user and an iPhone owner, so I thought I'd take the time to write a quick review.

I've also included a gallery of screenshots, and the text of the actual app info in the iTunes store. Check after the break to see all the info. :)